Marchitecture 2023

Fill your cities and towns with structures and vibrancy

Do your cities have inns, taverns, houses? Temples and sanctuaries? What about some less frequently thought of structures like places for spectating, sanitation, or transportation?
Use the month of March and this list of prompts to fill out the cities of your world! Building names, stubs, paragraphs, or full articles, any method of worldbuilding is a success for this.
Whoops we're already 3 days into March, fashionably late as usual

This list of prompts is intended to be setting agnostic, and should fit within any genre, time period, or style of world. For the most part, it's a list of things that a building would be designed for. Something like a building for Transportation, for example, could be anything such as a train station or landing pad, or even carriage parking and horse stables.

You can find the list below, but a far more interesting and interactive place to view and use the list would be on Catoblepon's spreadsheet of many community prompts! You can find the spreadsheet here, which you should definitely use! You can fill it out along side your fellow worldbuilders, and even include links to them should you feel like it -- and get a chance to see what others are building as well!

The List

1. Domestic

2. Community

3. Vacation

4. Viewpoint

5. Plaza

6. Production

7. Prisoner

8. Care

9. Exchange

10. Storage

11. Sanctuary

12. Temporary

13. Transportation

14. Spectator

15. Multi-family

16. Historical

17. Ruined

18. Marriage

19. Asylum

20. Education

21. Worship

22. Grid

23. Complex

24. Mobile

25. Gathering

26. Podium

27. Play

28. Exercise

29. Sanitation

30. Enforcement

How to win Marchitecture

Create one generic article, and use it to house all 30 of these architecture related prompts. Your mission, should you accept it, is to write at least 50 words relating to these prompts! Nice and easy! This can be accomplished in many ways: creating stubs for every prompt, writing small blurbs for them, creating articles, or my favourite option, drawing/designing a building and writing a few words of description :O
Winners will win: being awesome. And this awesome badge that you can display on your article!

Oooo! Ahhhh! Baaaadge!

Resources

Here's a quick little selection of things that I think are important to think about when designing or planning out a building, be it designing the actual structure or writing about its history! Of course there are already many lovely prompts within the building template to help write about your structures, but many of these help plan the very building itself.

Program

A building's "program" is in essence why the building should exist in the first place. What is the buildings purpose, and what are the purposes of the rooms? For example, "a space for people to sleep, live, cook, eat, and take care of themselves" would be a program fitting both for a single family house or for a hotel.

Concept

A building's concept is similar to it's program, but more nebulous and subjective. A concept is what ties together a buildings entire design, it should inform every decision made. An example concept for a church with massive clear windows and large overhangs might be "blurring the lines between interior and exterior".

Style

Not every setting will have every style of architecture, but it's good to look at them for inspiration. Additionally, think about the political and social climate that existed when a style was both concieved of and most popular during -- what about those time periods informed that style, and how does that change the building?

Site

Bad architecture is a building simply dropped into a random site. Good architecture takes into account the context surrounding the building. How do the surrounding structures, nearby forests, or staggering views of colossal mountains (or gods) change how a building might be designed? What about water, or soil types? Wind?

Scope

In essence, how big should this building be? Every typology of building can have big or small scopes. Is it a clinic for local people suffering from colds or small scale ailments, or is this a massive hospital complex that houses a nations top medical professionals, serving people all across a country?

Designer

While yes, you are the designer of this building, who might the designer be in your world? Are they famous for a certain style, are their buildings tourist attractions simply for being designed by them? Perhaps it wasn't an architect, but instead a builder who designed and built the project entirely themselves.

Materials

What is your building made out of, why, and how do these materials come together? Is it stone, bricks, adobe, steel, metal, futuristic material, glass, wood, brick... so many materials, and so many reasons why each might be chosen. Locality, ease of use, display of wealth, connection to the environment -- endless!

Controversy

Perhaps people hated the designer, or perhaps the chosen site has been fought over for many years. What if the building was in a radically new style that the current general public hated in comparison to what they were used to. Maybe there was shoddy construction, or incredible corruption in the process.

Client

Who is this building for? Many types of buildings are made for private clients -- things like houses, villas, or even warehouses or factories. Some are built for municipalities or governments, such as schools or hospitals -- yet those can be for private clients in particular situations as well.

Inspiration

Need a little something to get started? Here's a brief collection of links to things that you may find useful:

Wikipedia list of architectural styles

Archdaily for pictures of beautiful buildings

List of projects on Archilovers by material

List of projects on Archilovers by theme

19 Famous historical buildings from around the world